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Before the world’s nations reach agreement at annual UN climate summits, they spend a few days in Berlin trying to understand one another. Here is what the Petersberg Climate Dialogue is, how it started, and why it matters.

Every November, the world watches as delegates from nearly 200 countries crowd into vast conference centres to negotiate the future of the planet’s climate. The process is formal, exhausting, and often runs days past its scheduled close.

What fewer people see is the quieter gathering that takes place earlier each year, a two-day ministerial meeting in Berlin where trust is built. Positions are tested before the cameras arrive.

That is the Petersberg Climate Dialogue. After seventeen editions, it has become one of the most consequential forums in international climate diplomacy, yet most people have never heard of it.

Born from failure

The Dialogue’s origins are inseparable from one of climate diplomacy’s most painful moments.

It was initiated in the aftermath of the near-collapse of negotiations at the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP15) in Copenhagen. German Chancellor Angela Merkel sought to repair the breakdown in communication between leaders and environment ministers.

Copenhagen had promised much. After years of anticipation, world leaders arrived for the summit’s final days and left with a last-minute accord that satisfied almost no one. Binding emissions targets remained elusive, and trust between developed and developing nations visibly frayed.

Something had to change in how governments engaged between summits.

The first meeting was held in April 2010 at the Hotel Petersberg, near Bonn, the seat of the UN climate secretariat, which gave the Dialogue its name. Subsequent meetings moved to Berlin.

The format, however, mattered more than the venue. This was not designed as a negotiation. There would be no binding text, no voting, and no formal outcome documents. Instead, selected representatives would meet informally to explore positions, test ideas, and speak candidly without committing to fixed stances.

The aim was simple: create space for frank conversation where formal diplomacy could not.

How the Petersberg Climate Dialogue works

Each year, Germany hosts the meeting and co-chairs it with the country set to preside over that year’s COP. This structure gives the incoming COP Presidency an early, informal platform to outline priorities, test its agenda, and begin building the coalitions it will need months later.

Ministers from over 40 countries attend, alongside representatives from civil society, science, finance, and industry. Around 400 participants typically take part.

Closed-door ministerial sessions form the core of the Dialogue, complemented by side events, bilateral meetings, and stakeholder discussions that extend the conversation beyond the main room.

The guest list is deliberately curated. It brings together representatives of the most climate-vulnerable nations, including small island states and least developed countries, with major G20 economies.

That combination is rare. It places ministers with vastly different stakes in the same room, often without the constraints of formal negotiating scripts.

This is where the Dialogue’s influence begins to show.

In the lead-up to the Paris Agreement in 2015, the sixth Petersberg Climate Dialogue helped shape key elements of the process. Participants aligned on the need for countries to submit their climate contributions in advance, increase ambition toward the two-degree limit, and strengthen support for developing nations.

While no formal decisions were taken in Berlin, the informal convergence of positions helped lay the groundwork for what later became the architecture of the Paris Agreement.

The Dialogue proved its value again during the pandemic. In 2020, ministers met virtually for the first time, keeping the climate process active despite the collapse of global summitry. That year also expanded stakeholder participation, a format that has since remained part of the Dialogue.

What the Petersberg Climate Dialogue cannot do

It is important to be clear about the Dialogue’s limits. Precisely because it is informal, it produces no binding commitments. Positions aired in Berlin do not obligate governments.

Ministers can signal flexibility in April and return to harder positions by November. The Dialogue sets tone, not policy.

Nor can it substitute for political will. As ministers themselves have acknowledged, the science points to a narrowing window to contain global warming, and no amount of dialogue alters the underlying arithmetic of emissions.

Ambition built in Berlin must still survive domestic politics, economic pressures, and competing national interests.

Why it still matters

What the Petersberg Climate Dialogue does, consistently, is create the conditions in which agreement becomes possible.

It reduces misunderstanding before negotiations harden into positions. It allows trust to form where formal processes often produce distance. And it gives political leaders a rare space to test compromise before it becomes public.

In a system as complex and adversarial as international climate diplomacy, outcomes are rarely made in the spotlight. They are shaped, quietly, in rooms like this, long before the final gavel falls.

The Petersberg Climate Dialogue does not decide the future of climate action. But year after year, it helps determine whether agreement will be within reach when the world finally sits down to negotiate it.